Ubicom


Ubicom was a San Jose, CA-based company which developed communications and media processor and software platforms for real-time interactive applications and multimedia content delivery in the digital home. The company provided optimized system-level solutions to OEMs for a wide range of products including wireless routers, access points, VoIP gateways, streaming media devices, print servers and other network devices. Ubicom was a venture-backed, privately held company with corporate headquarters in San Jose, California.

History

Ubicom was founded as Scenix Semiconductor in 1996. The company operated under that name until 1999. In 2000, Scenix became "Ubicom," a word derived from "ubiquitous communications".
Ubicom designed several families of microcontrollers, including:
The Scenix/Ubicom processors relied on very high speed and low latency processing to emulate hardware interfaces in software such as interrupt-polled soft-UARTS. This reduced the size of the silicon chip and therefore the cost, but increased the complexity of the software required on the chip.
Ubicom developed its own architecture, the Ubicom32™, and a real-time operating system for it. For example, the D-Link HD Media Router 3000 DIR-857 contains the Ubicom IP8000AU and the Western Digital WD N900 the Ubicom IP8260U CPU. The firmware is most probably Linux-based, maybe even OpenWrt-based, rather than Ubicom RTOS-based.
Logging in via telnet on a Western Digital N900, the CPU and uClinux version is known as:

cat /proc/version
uClinux version 2.6.36+ #1 SMP Fri Apr 12 18:16:22 PHT 2013
  1.  cat /proc/cpuinfo 
Vendor : Ubicom
CPU : IP8K
MMU : enabled
FPU : enabled
Arch : 4
Rev : 1
Clock Freq : 600.0 MHz
DDR Freq : 533.0 MHz
BogoMips : 589.82
Calibration : 294912000 loops
Hardware : UbicomIP8K
cpu : thread id - 6
cpu : thread id - 2
cpu : thread id - 3
cpu : thread id - 4
cpu : thread id - 5
  1.  
  2.  cat /proc/interrupts 
 CPU0 CPU1 CPU2 CPU3 CPU4 Reentrant?
 2: 340937 361457 429308 449005 359141 0 UbicoIPI ipi
 27: 0 0 399980568 0 0 8216 Ubicom32 ubi32_na
 33: 30709990 0 0 0 0 25334 Ubicom32 timer-primary
 34: 0 11470112 0 0 0 3743 Ubicom32 timer-cpu
 35: 0 0 23060922 0 0 14194 Ubicom32 timer-cpu
 36: 0 0 0 41134181 0 56087 Ubicom32 timer-cpu
 37: 0 0 0 0 8820184 2088 Ubicom32 timer-cpu
 44: 0 0 0 0 0 0 PCIE-MSI aerdrv
 58: 0 0 0 0 0 0 Ubicom32 FAN SPEED
 60: 0 0 0 0 0 0 PCIE-MSI aerdrv
 70: 1 0 0 0 0 0 Ubicom32 dwc_otg, dwc_otg_hcd:usb1
 71: 1 0 0 0 0 0 Ubicom32 dwc_otg, dwc_otg_hcd:usb2
 82: 0 0 0 0 0 0 Ubicom32 UBI32_SERDES
 83: 60986 58900 60267 63509 63382 5056 Ubicom32 UBI32_SERDES 2
 92: 0 33996835 0 0 0 0 Ubicom32 wifi1
 93: 0 33996835 0 0 0 0 Ubicom32 pciej
 94: 0 0 0 31041951 0 0 Ubicom32 wifi0
 95: 0 0 0 31041951 0 2 Ubicom32 pciek

so it appears as some sort of low-frequency multithreaded CPU.